Linux at the BBC - page 3

Introduction

October 29, 1999

By
Damion Yates

Clearly we use all kinds of equipment in our
IT strategy, but for particular situations, Linux
is a winner, and I'm about to tell you why.

It's free

The Linux licensing means that there are none of
the financial constraints that might exist if extra
copies of licenses had to be purchased. So
this does encourage us to use it for all kinds
of applications.

It uses standards

When you are working with broadcast media you
must always have an eye for standards. The
material we send out has to be received
by millions of people, so it must be
compatible with whatever equipment those people
have. Because this is part of our core business,
in other areas we have a respect for standards
and the transparency they bring to the internal
workings of our complex systems.

The support is good

Our best support success story for Linux was
my contacting Donald Becker at NASA asking
about Driver support for the 3C900B
PCI network card. I first did several net
searches using the local Usenet Newsserver,
then http://www.dejanews.com/, as it was back
then, and I asked on IRC #linux channels.
I then read the kernel sources for said driver,
and found, as I'd expected, detailed comments.
After drawing a blank on these usual sources of
information I decided to email the author of
the actual device driver. His address appears
in most peoples' Linux boot sequence, and
also in the src, in case you're wondering how
I knew. I emailed, asking him to
reply to the work mailing list. The question
was basically whether this particular
brand of new 3com network card was compatible
with the existing driver. His C comments in
the kernel sources implied that there were some
problems with some of the newer ones that he was
working on, and he listed some successes and
failures. My card, the one that came with our
machines, wasn't even listed, as it was so new.

He replied in amazing detail within one hour!
Never in a million years had we expected the
actual author of the C driver code for the
operating system we were using to reply back
with such great detail so promptly.
I don't think you could _EVER_
get support like that from anywhere else. Due to
it being Open source, I'd already been able to vastly
surpass any possibility, had it been any other vendor
OS, of examining the situation myself.
.

It is efficient

Linux will run on low-specification hardware. As
I mentioned above, the digital text service
machines that directly feed the broadcasts
are very basic. The servers for most of our
DNS/DHCP servers are Pentium 166MHz with 32
MBytes of RAM, or similar spec. Even on these,
processor utilisation is low in normal running.

Remote access is easy

Linux boxes, as with all UNIX systems, provide X
or tty access to shells which communicate with
the kernel to provide interactive services.
Either mechanism allows _full_ control of the
system and, better still, has no relation to where
you are based. Controlling a command line shell
from the console is the same as controlling a
command line shell 800 miles away over a modem
in a remote moor in Scotland. You can even
'X' a graphical system to yourself if you don't
feel you can control everything you need from
the command line.